The Descent into the Maelstrom (The Phantom of the Earth Book 4) (30 page)

“You have it all figured out then.”

“You’re skeptical?”

“Realistic.” She stepped out of the spa. Nero watched the water drip down her body.

“Gods, I missed you,” he said. “I had no idea what to do.”

Verena smiled and dried herself with a towel. Nero stepped out, and she threw his towel at him. He protested when she stepped into her bodysuit. They lingered awhile. Finally, Nero relented and let her dress.

“You all nearly died in Permutation Crypt,” Verena said. “What makes you think the City of Eternal Darkness is easier?”

“I never said it would be.”

“You talk as if this is a simple trip to the moon or Mars, but everything’s changed.” Verena sat with Nero and let him wrap his arms around her. “You’ve changed.”

“For the better, I hope.”

“You do seem at peace, for the first time since I met you during the Harpoons,” Verena said. “Yet you’ve lost your humor.” Nero kissed her neck, and she closed her eyes. “I’ll help you find your true father, should we survive the war.”

“We will survive,” Nero said. “Aera’s
good
, love.” He thought about the battles in Permutation Crypt, the Research Superstructure, Mount Cineris, and the Comb Cove. “She’s better than good. She’s better than
me
.”

“Impossible!” Verena said softly and laughed. “I saw what she did in the Research Superstructure, or at least I heard the explosions. But this is different. They’re prepared for us now. And they must be preparing for her. Why else would the chancellor order so many new Janzers? Why else would Antosha send the Lorum to the one place Aera fears?”

“I won’t let her fail,” Nero said. “I won’t leave Brody to die.”

Verena stood and dried her hair with the towel. “I hate that I’m going to be useless in this.”

“Don’t say that.” Nero put on his bodysuit. “Think about the captain. Think about the twins.” He paused. “Think about Beimeni. They’ll all need you should this operation turn bad.”

“That’s the kind of bull people always say to the keeper bot.”

Nero turned. He didn’t see the little girl. “Connor’s waiting.”

Verena stretched out on the bioluminescent limestone. “Maybe we should make him wait a little longer. I’m getting tired of the BP telling me what to do and when to do it.”

Nero stroked his chin. “You make a strong argument, my lady.”

He undressed her and did his best to erase the last year from both their minds.

Time passed without any indication, no Granville day or stars, no news from the
Beimeni Press
, none of the contact with scientists, Janzers, and ministers that had marked Nero’s daily life for so many decades. Now he stood with his arms extended at his sides as Verena attached a stolen Janzer synsuit.

“This isn’t goodbye,” she said. “This is me telling you to go down there and get the job done and get out.” She attached the Janzer shin plates. “And when you get back—
when
,” she clamped the body plates together, “we’re using the Lorum. We’re not messing around. We’ll take the river straight into Farino City and free all the prisoners, take Brody back.”

For as tough and as assured as she sounded, Nero sensed she wanted to cry. She lifted a Janzer’s diamond sword and lay it atop her forefingers, flat across. Nero clutched the handle and sheathed it across his back.

He put his hand around her neck and kissed her, harder than he’d ever kissed her before, and he didn’t care about the BP who surrounded him or the timing or the operation, for he loved her more than he loved life itself, and this could be the last day he ever saw her.

“We must depart,” Connor said.

Nero drew back and pressed his forehead against Verena’s.

Jeremiah finished drilling a Janzer synsuit to Aera.

“Sorry lovebirds,” she said, “time to move.”

Verena, Aera, Connor, and Nero proceeded through the tortuous Hydra Hollow. All around them, faces of men, children, women, and the elderly looked on. They hung over cliffs on either side and dropped golden pebbles over their heads—a common Beimenian gesture, a wish for eternal life—and bowed and praised them and blessed them. Nero heard whispers and knew they prayed to the gods, as he had this morning when he wished for a victorious return, and Brody’s survival, and Verena, Oriana, and Pasha’s safety.

He took one last look at Verena before Aera hooded him. His eternal partner squeezed his hand, then Aera and Connor pulled him through a new set of darkened tunnels, no wider than a few meters, for hours and hours. Climbing, falling, sliding, and the perspiration condensed on the front of Nero’s helmet, over the visor.

Aera removed the hood.

They stood in a dim tunnel. An elderly man hung over a chair, a pipe in one hand, pulse gun in the other. He raised the gun and signaled to Connor, who hand-signaled back.

“Can never be too careful, young ones,” the man said.

“Thanks, Fred,” Connor said.

He kicked a stone, and a false wall cracked open, leading into the back of a pawnshop. The cooled Gaian atmosphere struck Nero, and he sighed. Synisms of every legal type stood in glass vials on the limestone shelves—synisms that refilled coolant systems, synisms that maintained oxygen levels, and synisms that spun yarn into cloth faster than any machine. The woman behind the counter squinted at Connor, who put on a worn-out fedora and flipped her a benari coin. Her eyes widened when she caught it. Connor dipped his head in thanks, and they stepped outside.

They entered a bazaar in Gaia City. Green lights spun on pedestals, tradesmen, office workers, and engineers strutted here and there in bodysuits, and workers in dirty trousers, torn shirts, and stained fedoras marched along the pedestrian paths to the power plants. Nero and Aera separated from Connor and moved onward into the flow of engineers to Givetia Station while he blended with the plant workers.

Outside the station, men and woman rode on horseback across a narrow stone bridge. Nero stepped onto the bridge and looked down at the glowing pond below. On the other end, brick residential units rose up from the limestone, and above those, jagged rock and more units and more stone. Nero neared a group of phosphorescent, power-producing, geothermal pillars and peered up. The ceiling wasn’t a Granville sky but stalactites that glowed with red-orange bioluminescence. He sensed something out of place.

Aera.

Where was Aera?

He turned.

She was back on the bridge.

He looked around, but he neither saw nor sensed any danger. Aera was staring straight ahead, not moving. Something was wrong.

He scurried back to her, searched his neurochip for Janzer protocols. Their position was highly visible.

He revolved around her. “You all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice influenced by a synthesizer to make her sound like a Janzer.

But he could tell she wasn’t
fine
. This wasn’t the Aera he had battled alongside in Permutation Crypt, the Aera who had toyed with him on Mount Cineris, who had dismantled the Research Superstructure transport station in less than a minute and saved his eternal partner from certain death. This was someone he hadn’t met before. This Aera was afraid.

“Breathe,” he said. Her chest plates were hardly moving.

A Beimenian party on horses climbed up into the settlement. They stared at the bridge, as did the two Janzers who guarded the Western Passage Transport entrance, the part of Givetia Station that led to the Western Inaccessible Region and Nyx.

If she didn’t move soon, they would fail before the operation even began. Not so much because of these Janzers as because of the warning that would surely be raised when they fought.

“Don’t look at the pillars,” Nero said. “Don’t think about the city. Imagine all the aspects of your life that have improved since then, everything you hope to accomplish in the commonwealth, everything that you’ve told me about: reforming the system, removing Chancellor Masimovian. It’s all within your grasp! The commonwealth is distracted by the Regenesis procedure in the North and the Harpoons in the Northeast.
This
is our opportunity to strike the iron fist. Now move your feet. One in front of the other.”

I can’t do this without you
, he sent, without Marstone’s interference, hoping she would hear and listen to him.
C’mon, mighty Aera, one foot in front of the other
…

He glanced casually to the station entrance.

The Janzers stirred and leaned, motioning to each other with their hands. They weren’t on alert yet, but they definitely stared back at Nero, definitely pondered these Janzers who chatted on the bridge, and evaluated the identity of this Janzer who froze—and broke protocol.

Nero gritted his teeth and lifted the clear visor within the helmet that covered his face. He leaned in next to Aera.

“Let’s go, soldier.”

She stared past him.

“I’m with you. I’m here. Let’s move.”

I’ll take them out
, Nero thought.
We’ll have to do this louder than I planned
.

He wouldn’t give up.

She still didn’t move.

The Janzers sped toward the bridge.

Candidate Classroom

Harpoon VR

“Choices,” Lady Isabelle said. “In our underground existence we are faced with unimaginable choices. A poor decision by one of us could lead to the end of more than three hundred million people. The transhuman race inside Earth.”

Lady Isabelle sauntered along the wooden planks at the base of the candidate stadium. She climbed the steps toward Oriana’s row. Her heels clacked against the steps on her way up. She passed behind Oriana, who stood next to Pasha. Just as Lady Isabelle was about to reenter Oriana’s line of sight, she turned, backtracked, and came to rest directly behind her. Oriana cringed and stared straight ahead. Lady Isabelle shifted behind her but didn’t move on. Oriana’s face grew warm, then hot. She felt the eyes of the other candidates, who were beginning to notice her discomfort. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

On the other side of the row, a group of girls sniggered. Lady Isabelle shot toward them. “Is there something you’d like to add? Something so amusing you’d like to share with the rest of us?” The candidates stood stiffly. Oriana would have thanked them if she could. She exhaled discreetly, closing her eyes.

“You haven’t been scoring high enough in the simulations to warrant such disrespect,” Lady Isabelle continued. “I’ll note this lack of courtesy in your first-half scores.”

The girls blanched. They had darker skin than Lady Isabelle, whose porcelain tone matched the candidates Oriana had known from Piscator, Jurinar, Gaia, and Navita. She always found it odd that the instructor didn’t treat her own skin with
E. pigmentation,
something which the Summersets had done from the first few days of development. These candidates clearly received treatments, for they hailed from Houses Adao, Lissette, Coniac, and Aelena, elite houses of the Northeast.

Lady Isabelle descended the steps. She walked in a semicircle beneath the Harpoon insignia, which hovered like a chandelier over the candidate stadium, her hands clasped behind her cape. “With just two days to the exams, I thought it fitting to conclude our lessons with a different kind of exercise. Something representative of the difficulty you might encounter during the critical-reasoning portion of the exams.” She inclined her head. “Miss Oriana.” She waved her hand. “Come hither.”

Pasha’s grin disappeared when the instructor summoned him as well. “And Nathan Storm,” she said. “Yes you, come hither.”

One of the Harpoon insignia’s golden triangles descended to the wooden planks. Lady Isabelle nodded to it and said, “Take your positions on each corner, if you would be so kind.”

Oriana, Pasha, and Nathan took their positions at the illuminated triangle’s points.

Lady Isabelle orbited them, projecting her voice over all the candidates in all the thirty territories who attended class. “You see, children, we live in a dangerous world, with the weight of two thousand meters of raw earth above us, some of it infested with Reassortment. A dumb move by one engineer could collapse a territory, killing millions. If a coolant specialist fails to repair a malfunction in the piping system, millions could burn and suffocate. If the gamma ray shielding fails in the pressure-release pipes, Reassortment might wipe us out.” She turned. “One fisherman who doesn’t hit his quota and whose laziness spreads could take a vital part of the transhuman diet away from us.”

She whipped around, glowering at Oriana. “One scientist who decides he doesn’t have to follow the chancellor’s precepts could lead others down a dark, dangerous path, and put all our lives at risk.” She twisted and looked at all the candidates. “Do you understand what I’m telling you today?”

“
Aye!
” the candidates said in unison.

“You serve whom?”

“We serve Beimeni.”

“And when you serve, what do you gain?”

“Immortality!”

“Serve Beimeni.”

“LIVE FOREVER!”

Isabelle turned her back to the stands and lowered her voice so that only Oriana, Pasha, and Nathan could hear her. “Miss Oriana, do you think I’m a fool?”